Before this week the correct approach to the summer's Ashes series has been to say that you're just not letting yourself think about it. It's not on your mind at all. You haven't so much as allowed the word "Ashes", or any suggestion of weather-beaten men in green caps to skitter across the frontal brain-flange without jamming a soldering iron into your eye socket until the mutinous tissue has been burnt away and you can go back to thinking about Peter Andre, or polenta, or why all cyclists are angry.

This has now changed. First Ricky Ponting announced the tourists were formally "targeting" England's captain, Andrew Strauss. Then fast bowler Mitchell Johnson personally targeted Ravi Bopara as his Ashes opponent – a wonderful moment for Bopara, albeit one that might yet inflate his already rampant self-esteem to a level where he comes dangerously close to making a pistol out of his finger and thumb and doing a "pee-yow" noise as he enters a room, or referring to himself in public by a nickname nobody else uses, like "The Rav-Daddy" or "The Bop-Man".

Targeting is something you don't really get in other sports, and even less so in other walks of life. Few professions have cricket's essential aura of attritional combat, the kind of atmosphere that might allow you to publicly "target" the junior marketing executive at a rival industrial solvent firm, or to talk menacingly about "getting in the face of" a lady who also teaches clarinet in the Maidenhead area.

Targeting is a cricket thing, and specifically an Ashes thing. With this in mind the pre-series sparring does look unpromising on the home front. England have an unusually taciturn and introverted bowling line-up. For all his gangling aggression Stuart Broad still seems more likely to invite you to a barbecue at his flat than emit a chilling aura of flinty-eyed loathing. It might even be time to out-source a little of the pre-Ashes phony war, and to this end I've decided to get things started by personally targeting Australia's reserve wicketkeeper Graham Manou.

This might not seem like a headline target. Nobody really knows anything about Manou, beyond the fact that he's 1.81m tall and his nickname is Choc. But I still believe I can best him in the early psychological jousts. I sense his weaknesses. The fact that he occasionally pretends to know stuff about wine in restaurants, that he once called his primary school teacher "mum" by mistake and still feels a hot flush of shame creeping up his neck when he recalls the roared laughter of his classmates. Plus his fear of dogs that are so small they no longer look like dogs, but instead have worryingly human facial expressions.

That's Manou pretty much sorted. Unless he's one of those players – and you suspect Bopara might also be one – who responds to a targeting by righteously laying about the opposition. Historically, targeting does have a perverse ability to inspire as well as cow. In which case, and in the interests of bolstering in any way possible England's Ashes hopes, I'd also like to point out that Kevin Pietersen has a fear of natural yoghurt and occasionally eats a whole jar of peanut butter with a teaspoon while watching Cash in the Attic.